The new Romantic Circles Reviews & Receptions section is an innovative venture in contemporary Romantic scholarship, comprising short reviews of recent work, live BookChats, BookLists, a forum for debate, and an evolving compendium of appearances of Romanticism in popular culture.

This list will seem noticeably familiar to many. And that appears to be the point. If there ever was a primal scene for Romanticism and theory, especially in the way it was staged within North America, the 1970s would be the name for it. Explicitly confronting or implicitly shadowboxing with that decade’s critical disposition still colors our critical endeavors more than forty years afterward, from New Historicism in the 1980s to contemporary interventions of the New Materialisms and the Affective Turn.

“Should work really be such fun?” asks Jennie Batchelor, lead researcher of The Lady’s Magazine: Understanding the Emergence of a Genre project (“The Monster”). In posing this question, Batchelor points to the myth of the isolated struggle and subsequent seriousness of...